Essay by Fern L. Nesson and Nico M. Nesson
The American Guide Series, produced by the Federal Writers’ Project, is one of the most well-known WPA projects. Written as a collection of travel guides, the series included suggested tour routes as well as essays on the history and culture of each U.S. state and territory. Major U.S. cities and several regions were also given their own separate guidebooks.
The state guides give a fascinating snapshot of American life in the 1930s. Written in a lively and approachable style, they detail and celebrate the rich diversity that our country displayed at that time. The writers’ enthusiasm is infectious and their guide is as much fun to read today as it must have been for travelers in the 1930s.
Several historians have written about the American Guide Series over the past 80 years, but no one, to my knowledge, has used them as current-day travel guides. That is just what I set out to do. I am an American historian, art photographer, and enthusiastic traveler. I have read each of these guides. I love them for their wonderful enthusiasm and their curiosity about every aspect of regional life—from food, to linguistics, to folklore, to statistics, to geography, to environment, to history—and especially for their liberal attitudes and respect for diversity. In this series, I will be posting photo essays and articles based upon tours recommended in the guides.
Fern L. Nesson
When my granddaughter, Nico, was researching the history of the Lowell Mills Girls for her AP American History class, we spent a fascinating day together in Lowell. This essay is the result of our combined research and it includes photos that we shot during our visit.
Lowell, Massachusetts was at the forefront of the industrial revolution in the 19th Century. As a result of the War of 1812, our country could no longer rely upon receiving manufactured goods from England and we turned instead to establish our own factories. New England was the logical location for these efforts.
There the Yankee farmers, long accustomed to the production of household goods, had a training in handicraft that equipped them to organize and manage the mills that dotted the countryside. The many streams that coursed the State’s valleys furnished a plentiful supply of water-power. Labor could be secured as in no other section of the Union, for thousands of Massachusetts farmers were ready to abandon their unequal struggle with a stubborn soil and drift into industrial employment […] MASSACHUSETTS STATE GUIDE, P. 46.
In 1814, Francis Cabot Lowell built the first textile mill in Waltham, Massachusetts and outfitted it with power looms. Within 10 years, textile mills had sprung up in Lowell, Lawrence, Fall River, and New Bedford and, by the time of the Civil War, more than one-third of all the cloth of the nation was produced in the state (Massachusetts State Guide, p. 50).
Lowell and his partners then built a complex of larger mills on the Merrimack River in northeastern Massachusetts. The first of the Lowell Mills were opened in 1822.
Overnight, the company founders became the first city fathers in what would today be called a huge company town. Both men and women slept in corporation lodging houses, ate in company dining-rooms, shopped in company stores, and were buried in company lots.
Employees worked from five in the morning to seven at night. Women received from two dollars and twenty-five cents to four dollars a week, men about twice that.
Agents of the company scoured Europe in search of cheap labor, painting glowing pictures of the promised land across the sea and luring thousands of immigrants into the maw of the hungry, growing city.
On March 1, 1826, the district was incorporated as the township of Lowell…. Europe watched Lowell with something like amazement. Its rapid rise to industrial eminence interested and astounded economists, historians, and writers all over the world.
Massachusetts State Guide, p. 51.
Along with Lowell’s newly-constituted labor force came the creation of the country’s first labor unions.
These pioneers were responsible for the recognition by their State of the right to join a labor union, for the spread of free education, for at least the partial freeing of women and children from industrial slavery, and for the relaxation of laws that penalized a man and his family for being poor.
Most of these pioneers of Massachusetts democracy, like the majority of Western pioneers, remain anonymous, their names and deeds either lost altogether or buried in the files of old newspapers, union journals, trade union records, Labor Department reports, ships’ logs, and other obscure sources from which much of even so brief an account as the present must be derived.
A few outstanding names emerge: those of George McNeill, a weaver of Fall River, of Ira Steward, a machinist of Boston, of the Lowell textile workers Sarah G. Bagley and Lucy Larcom, the latter a poet and author of ‘A New England Girlhood.’
Massachusetts State Guide, p. 65.
The Lowell Mill Girls
Of particular interest to Nico, and the subject of her research, were the Lowell Mill Girls. The following section is her contribution to our essay.
Starting in 1822 and all throughout the 19th century, hundreds of young, unmarried women left their family farms and accepted the offer of jobs working in the cotton mills in Lowell, Massachusetts. These young women, who became known as “Lowell Mill Girls,” lived in company-owned boarding houses and their work life, education and recreation revolved almost totally around their employment in the mills.
Typically 30 to 40 young women lived together in a boardinghouse, sharing meals and bedrooms where they slept two to a bed. Mill girls were required to report for work at 5AM and to work until 7PM, with only a 20 minute break at 7AM for breakfast and a 45 minute break at noon for lunch. Work on Saturday was from 5AM to noon.
We have only thirty minutes or at most three quarters of an hour, allowed us to go from our work, partake of our food, and return to the noisy clatter of machinery. Up before day, at the clang of the bell— and out of the mill by the clang of the bell—into the mill, and at work, in obedience to the ding dong of a bell—just as though we were so many living machines. I will give my notice to-morrow: go, I will—I won’t stay here and be a white slave.”
Anonymous Letter to the Lowell Offering.
In the absence of any safety codes, the Lowell Mill Girls worked at their own (considerable) risk. Harsh working conditions and long hours of operation in demanding environments led to physical strain and health problems. In a letter to the editor of the Boston Daily Evening Voice, one Mill Girl wrote,
I attended school three months during the following summer; then worked about eighteen months longer in the factory; afterwards worked in the weave room, in all three years, but only about six months at a time, as my health would not allow me to work longer. The labor of attending three or four looms thirteen hours a day, with no time for recreation or mental improvement is very severe.
Despite the fact that they worked in the same long hours and faced the same risks, Mill girls were paid substantially less than their male counterparts, making it difficult to support themselves let alone save for the future. Job security was virtually nonexistent, leaving them vulnerable to sudden dismissals or layoffs.
Given the long working hours and the difficulty of transportation, most Mill Girls rarely returned to their homes. Instead, they turned to each other for companionship. The camaraderie that developed greatly aided in successful labor organizing.
However arduous, jobs for women in the Lowell Mills provided a unique source of economic opportunity for them during a time when other employment options were limited. Prior to the establishment of cotton mills, women’s opportunities for working outside their homes were quite limited.
Before the arrival of steam-powered machines, most women of the lower classes worked in their homes under the control of their fathers or husbands. Many women took in work spinning thread or weaving cloth. Any money made by women at home was the lawful property of their male guardian.
Brownson, Women and The American Story.
But in the Lowell mills, women were able to earn their own money and to spend it as they wished.
For the first time in this country women’s labor had money value. She had become not only an earner and a producer, but also a spender of money, a recognized factor in the political economy of her time.
Jeff Levinson, Mill Girls of Lowell.
Equally important, employment outside the home brought a sense of freedom. Unlike most young women of that era, the Mill Girls were free of parental authority and had access to education. In Lowell, they formed an active community of learners, attending public lectures in the evenings.
Many of the prominent men of the country were in habit of giving Lyceum lectures, and the Lyceum lecture of that day was a means of education, conveying to the people the results of study and thought through the best minds. At Lowell, it was more patronized by the mill-people than any mere entertainment.
Lucy Carcom, A New England Girlhood.
The Lowell Mill Girls played a pivotal role in the early labor rights movement and became some of the earliest advocates for women’s rights as well. They fought against the harsh conditions and their unequal treatment by forming associations and published the “Lowell Offering” magazine, which allowed them to express their grievances.
After staging a walk-out in protest of lay-offs in 1834, the Mill Girls went out on strike in 1836, protesting proposed wage cuts.
One of the first strikes of cotton-factory operatives that ever took place in this country was that in Lowell, in October, 1836 […]
One of the girls stood on a pump, a gave vent to the feelings of her companions in a neat speech, declaring that it was their duty to resist all attempts at cutting down the wages.
This was the first time a women had spoken in public in Lowell and the event caused surprise and consternation among her audience.”
Harriet Robinson, Loom and Spindle.
A few years later, the Mill Girls established their own labor union, the Female Labor Reform Association, led by Sarah Bagley, one of the first labor organizers in the country. The Association organized the first public campaign for reduced working hours by petitioning the Massachusetts legislature for a 10-hour work day. The petition eloquently described their intolerable working conditions:
We toil from thirteen to fourteen hours per day,
confined in unhealthy apartments, exposed to
the poisonous contagion of air, vegetable,
animal and mineral properties, debarred from
proper Physical exercise, time for Mental discipline
and Mastication cruelly limited; thereby hastening us on
through pain, disease, and privation,
down to a premature grave.
Subsequent Labor History
The Lowell Mill Girls’ experiences marked a significant chapter in the history of the labor and women’s rights movements in the United States but success in ameliorating working conditions was long in coming. It was not until 1874 that the legislature enacted a law limiting working hours in textile mills to 10 hours per day. (Workers in other mills did not see their hours reduced to 10 hours per day until 1921.)
As of the writing the Guide in 1939, hours had been reduced, but very little else had improved in Massachusetts mills. Women and children still worked under horrendous conditions:
Of the 122,389 workers in the textile mills of the State in 1937, forty per cent were women. In the textile industry, women are a permanent labor force. Most of them enter the mills at a very early age and remain therefor the greater part of their lives. Even marriage does not always take the textile working girl out of the mill, for the earnings of her husband seldom suffice to meet the family expenses.
[Wage parity was certainly not achieved.] Weekly wages for women range from $8 per week for ordinary workers to $27 for the most highly skilled spinners or weavers. Since there are seasonal periods of unemployment, weekly earnings over long periods naturally average considerably less. [Moreover] The ‘speedup’ and ‘stretchout’ systems, together with improvements in machinery, have vastly increased the machine load per worker. Ten years ago an operative commonly took care of a single loom, now he or she cares for thirty or more. According to the May, 1937 issue of the “Textile Worker of New England,” ‘Within the past two months the textile mills, while announcing a 10 per cent increase in wages, have actually increased the work load of the operatives from 25 to 200 per cent.’ Massachusetts Guide, p. 77.
For children, the situation was even worse. The Guide reports that in 1930 Census, there were 60,524 children from ten to seventeen years old employed full time in Massachusetts mills. Of this number 9824 were younger than fifteen. Although children’s hours were reduced to eight hours per day in 1913, their work outside of the mills was totally unregulated. Minors could still be bound as full-time apprentices or hired out as servants, and full-time farm and piece work within their homes was at the discretion of their parents.
The City of Lowell, Then and Now:
The peak of the city’s industrial development was achieved prior to 1924. After that, the mills lost profitability and, one-by-one, they all closed.
In the devastating debacle of 1929, many of the mills moved south [where labor was non-unionized and cheaper.] The whole textile industry of the city was reduced by fifty percent, and thousands of workers were left jobless and homeless. Lowell lost its position as the most important textile center in the world. It ceased to be the ‘Spindle City.’
Massachusetts Guide, p. 262-3.
But the story does not end there. In the 1960’s, Lowell undertook to restore the Lowell Cotton Mills for use as an educational tourist center. Now the Lowell Mills are a National Historical Park:
By the 1950s, all ten of the large textile companies that had driven Lowell’s economy since the early 19th-century were closed down or moved elsewhere. The closings caused unemployment, depression, and a loss of Lowell’s sense of itself.
The closings also left nearly five million square feet of abandoned mill space. The crumbling brick complexes stood as mute reminders of Lowell’s heyday and the loss of the city’s principal industry. Some of these complexes were torn down, some fell to arson and accidental fire, and all continued to be ravaged by the effects of weather, vandalism, and the passing years.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, a new preservation ethic emerged in Lowell. Concerned citizens and local institutions worked with the city, state and federal governments to save Lowell’s history and to use that history as an engine for economic growth. That effort resulted in the establishment of Lowell National Historical Park in 1978.
https://www.nps.gov/lowe/planyourvisit/redevelopment
The renovated Lowell Mills Park is nothing short of spectacular. The 19th century mill buildings are structurally impressive and immensely beautiful and have been renovated with the utmost good taste and care. Many of the buildings contain historical exhibits and, in the main building, the entire first floor recreates the cotton weaving room exactly was it was in the 19th century. The looms are operable and you can see—and hear—them in operation when you visit.
There is a lot to learn from the early history of the Lowell Mills and its revived historical spaces provide much to admire in the present. Nico and I urge you to visit.
Nico and Fern Nesson
December, 2023.
